Comprehensive Healthcare (CHC), a Community Mental Health Center with 50 years of experience, strives to improve and advance the CHC Certified Community Behavioral Health Clinic (CCBHC) Project within Yakima County, Washington. Comprehensive Healthcare seeks to improve access to community-based mental health and substance use disorder treatment and support, including 24/7 crisis services, to anyone in the Yakima County service area who needs support, regardless of their ability to pay or place of residence. As a CCBHC, CHC continues to focus on serving any individual with a mental health or substance use disorder who seeks care, including those with serious mental illness (SMI), substance use disorder (SUD) including opioid use; children and adolescents with serious emotional disturbance (SED); individuals with co-occurring mental health and substance disorders (COD); and individuals experiencing a mental health or substance use-related crisis. CHC strives to address health disparities and provides services to individuals regardless of race, ethnicity, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, and/or socioeconomic status.
Over the course of this four-year grant CHC will serve a total of 5200 unduplicated individuals: 1000 in Year One, 1200 in Year Two, 1400 in Year Three, and 1600 in Year Four. Strategies and interventions will include system and service transformation to enhance responsiveness and support for a wide array of clinical needs, implementing chronic disease management, increased substance use disorder services, enhancement of the CHC Walk-in Clinic, improving the identification of and response to suicide risk, increased services and supports for homeless individuals, increasing access to peer support specialists, and training to increase practitioner skills and competencies.
Goals and objectives will be achieved by improving service delivery structures through enhanced outreach and engagement by hiring additional staff to increase service delivery capacity, adding a Medical Assistant position at the Walk-in Clinic, implementing use of the Columbia Suicide Severity Rating Scale (C-SSRS), implementing the Just in Time prescribing model, and hiring of bilingual staff and/or representatives of marginalized populations to support services to underserved populations. CHC will further enhance services through ongoing targeted training of staff and consultants including but not limited to Motivational Interviewing, cultural competency, trauma informed services, developmentally appropriate care, and treatment of older adults.